Byte, September 1990

1975 was the year
before the Apple I was created, before Apple Computer incorporated,
before Shugart invented the 5.25" floppy, the year Micro-soft
began, and the year Byte published its first issue.

As the editorial in this issue notes, "Byte was born along with the
microcomputer industry, back when the idea of a computer of your own
was a novel concept. In fact, small computers weren't even called
'personal computers' until Byte coined the term, in our May 1976
issue."

In the September 1990 issue, Byte looked back at the first fifteen
years of personal computing - and into the future.

Claris

Apple reversed itself on Claris, which it had earlier decided would
become a separate company. Instead, Claris would remain a full owned
subsidiary of Apple - just as FileMaker is today.

Networking

Dayna was preparing to ship their DaynaPort ethernet cards for the
Mac II and SE/30 at a retail price of $495.

PC Upgrades

TransComputer and Feith Systems both announced 25 MHz 486 upgrades
for 386 computers. With CPU, the TransComputer upgrade sold for
$1,686.

Computing at Chaos Manor

Always one of my favorite Byte columns, Jerry Pournelle was the
first Byte staffer to write from the user's perspective. He discusses
"Pournelle's Laws," which begin with "One user, at least one CPU" and
"Silicon is cheaper than iron."

The first rule represents the battle for personal computers with
their own processors, a war fought against the mainframe and
minicomputer mentality of powerful servers and dumb clients. History
repeats itself today as companies look at application servers and thin
clients.

"Silicon is cheaper than iron" pointed to the fact that it's cheaper
to upgrade a computer than replace it. "A large part of my original
opposition to the Apple Macintosh was because the original Mac was an
all-up [i.e., slotless] machine with a proprietary bus and operating
system...."

The other aspect of Pournelle's Second Law was that solid state
memory would eventually displace the hard drive. By 1990, Pournelle
recognized that hard drives had become so affordable compared to any
form of solid state memory, that this was unlikely to happen.

Macinations

The late Don Crabb asked if the Mac really was the best computer for
desktop publishing, a market Apple and Aldus had created over the past
few years. The consensus among DTP workers was that the Mac best suited
the workflow, making it the best choice for design work.

Looking at Windows 3.0, Crabb declared it the first OS that could
beat the Mac at its own game, giving users about 85% of what the Mac
with System 6 did. Of course, it wasn't until Windows 95 that Microsoft
came close to filling that 15% gap.

Nisus is still with us, although
Nisus Writer is just a niche player. WordPerfect for Mac reached version
3.5 and became freeware. And Microsoft Word
clearly dominates the Mac market today. The others have fallen by the
wayside.

The Mac at 40 MHz

Tom Thompson took a look at the
"wicked fast" $10,000 Macintosh
IIfx, which had graced the cover of the April 1990 Byte.
Although Motorola unveiled the 68040 during 1990, it would be another
year before the first Quadras appeared.

The state of the art on the PC side was 33 MHz 80486 "desktop
supercomputers," demonstrating that such hyperbole was not born with
the Power Mac G4.

Thompson writes, "No doubt PCs soon will run at this [40 MHz] speed,
but that doesn't diminish the fact that the IIfx got there first, doing
what Macs do best: providing a consistent user interface, seamless data
exchange, and gorgeous 24-bit color graphics."

Just to remind you of the realities of the era, the IIfx ran System
6.0.5 and could only address 8 MB of RAM - unless you had a copy of
Connectix Maxima, which would let the System use 14 MB, allocating any
additional RAM as a RAM Disk. System 7, which enabled 32-bit addressing
and use of virtual memory, wouldn't be available until May 1991.

Two Different Approaches to Mac Portability

Back in 1990, the only portable Mac was the 16 pound Macintosh Portable. A fine computer
in many respects, the portable ran a 68000 CPU at 16 MHz, which really
did provide nice performance under System 6. (I've even run System
7.5.5 on mine - not bad at all.)

This article looks at the Outbound, a lunchbox-style portable, and
the Dynamac SE/30, a more traditional laptop design.

The lunchbox design was pioneered by Compaq. Everything but the
keyboard was packed into a case with a screen on the front and a handle
on top. I really did remind you of a lunchbox. The keyboard was
separate; in the case of the Outbound, it also included their IsoPoint
alternative to mice and trackballs.

Outbound owners had the same 16 MHz 68000 processor as the Mac
Portable, but at a much lower price - $3,499 vs. $6,499. Outbound's
workaround for not having a license to clone the Mac was clever: The
user had to provide ROMs from a Mac Plus or SE.

The Dynamac SE/30 went one step beyond that - it contained an SE/30
motherboard. It also had a yellow-on-black gas plasma display, which
meant it couldn't run off battery power.

Byte 15th Anniversary Summit

Byte convened a panel of 63 industry experts. These are brief
excerpts from the summit.

Where is the microcomputer industry headed in the next 5, 10, 15
years?

Jim Manzi: I think the dominance of microcomputing - personal
computing, workstation computing, desktop computing - will be so
overwhelming five years from now....

Dick Shaffer: It's the dominant technology ... over the next
several [years].

What about the power of the hardware? Will that increase
significantly? Or have we gone about as far as we can?

Gordon Campbell: In the next decade, we're going to see
microprocessors, basically, hooked up with more than one in a box.
(Predicts 100-300 MIPS performance.)

Stewart Alsop: Bigger, faster, cheaper.

Gordon Bell: ...minimally giving them a factor of 10 or
more.

Donald Knuth: ...computers are going to double in speed every
year until 1995, and then they're going to run out of ideas.

To get a little more detailed, how do you expect semiconductors to
evolve? And what will be the effect of that evolution?

Jack Kilby: ...we're on our way down to 0.7- and 0.5-micron
lines, and we will see those happen. [By 1990, some chips were using
0.15 micron lines.]

Bob Noyce: You do see some barriers arising, but still, those
barriers have been about a decade away for some time. So I think that
it will last another 10 years or so.

What about the software side of the equation? Or are all the
changes coming in hardware?

Brian Kernighan: Software, unfortunately, is not nearly as
easy to make go better as hardware seems to be. And the software will
not get better fast enough, and so you'll piddle away more and more of
[the power] on stuff that doesn't quite work the way you want it
to....

How about networks - what do you see as their future? How will
networking change the industry?

Michael Slater: Networking, I think, will become standard in
PCs, as it is standard on workstations today.

Paul Allen: ...everybody's going to have a super-powerful
network machine on their disk, maybe 15 years out.

Terry Winograd: ...it will be odd to have a microcomputer in
a work setting that isn't tied into a network. And, of course, we'll
have other technology to tie into that - radio networks and cellular
phone networks, etc.

Danny Hillis: ...and then those local area networks would one
way or another be connected to a big network. So in some sense, the
whole concept of the network will break down, and everything will be
connected to everything in some software sense.

Jonathan Titus: I think that major advances . . . over at
least the next five years, are going to come in communications, and the
ability for people to have one computer talk to another computer almost
anywhere in the U.S., and perhaps in Western Europe....

How will the evolution of microcomputers affect minicomputers and
mainframes?

Tony Hoare: I think the microprocessor industry will come to
dominate the whole of the computer industry.

Tom McWilliams: Basically, today, they've replaced the
minicomputers. I see the microcomputer becoming more and more dominant
and taking over all the computing except the largest machines'.

And how about user interface? How do you think we will interact
with computers in 10 or 15 years?

Michael Slater: I think the character-mode applications will
almost entirely go away, and everybody will make the transition into
graphical user interface applications.

Terry Winograd: Rather than having a bunch of applications,
we will have more of an integrated environment into an interface that
lets me move smoothly into what I want to do, and it will organize what
I want to do instead of organizing it by individual pieces of
software.

David Evans: Surely, they'll understand the spoken
language.

On software patents

Alvy Ray Smith: Patent issues. I think that's the number one
problem. I thank that's the most serious problem confronting the
software industry in the next decade. Really trivial ideas are going to
be patented. [Like one-click shopping?]

What do you think a typical microcomputer will look like in 10 or
15 years?

Bill Joy: Ten years - very powerful, multiprocessor, enormous
amounts of semiconductor memory, probably [will] not have a disk.
Probably it will all be semiconductor, run on batteries, be portable,
have a different metaphor than mouse/keyboard, probably involving voice
input....

Ryoichi Mori: Ten or 15 years [from now], typical
microcomputers will look like today's microcomputers. Here, "look like"
means that the price and size of most packages will be typically the
same. The contents will be improved 100 to 1000 times.

Dick Shaffer: Let's just think what you could do if you had
today's R6000 or today's MIPS machines or today's Silicon Graphics -
$100,000 personal, graphics supercomputers - available for about
$1,000.

Stephen Wolfram: The most likely mechanism for connecting to
peripheral devices would be some kind of an infrared-based thing. I
mean, the whole idea of having wires and definite connections is
clearly not a particularly good one.

Let's discuss the subject of portability. Do you think we'll have
notebook computers or pocket computers? How do you think the size will
evolve?

Mitch Kapor: We're going to see the next generation in
portability, things that are smaller than today's laptops: clipboard
sized computers and shirt-pocket-size computers. The stylus-based
interface is going to be very, very important for that class of
devices....

Gordon Bell: The computer will disappear by another 10 years
in [its present form]. There will be zero-cost notebook-size computers
with one chip in them that will have about 32 megabytes.

Doug Engelbart: Everyone's going to have a computer - carried
around or surgically implanted, or sitting on your hat or your
spectacles or whatever - and they're all going to be connected
. . . and those networks will be wireless.

This sounds more like a portable office than a portable computer.
Do you really think cellular phones and faxes will enter the notebook
arena?

Nicholas Negroponte: There will be a family of physical
products that will range in size from things the size of your wallet or
a cellular telephone to real bona fide laptops to desktops.

John Markoff: Right now most people have desktop computers as
their principal computers, and they have a laptop as a secondary
computer. And I think that all the innovation is going to be taking
place in the smaller packages. We're all still trying to build a
Dynabook . . . and we're going to get progressively
closer to it.

Mitch Kapor: I think [the typical microcomputer is] going to
look pretty much like the ones today, except that there are going to be
new form factors like palmtop computers, desktop supercomputers....

On the next revolution

Alan Kay: To me, the second computer revolution is not just
the computer on the desktop, but the Macintosh/Xerox PARC way of doing
user interface. What the Mac did was to redefine the relationship of
the user....

The third revolution that is going to come is one that is driven by
networking - it's a pervasive technology - and I call [it] the intimate
revolution.

What technological advances will we see in the 1990s that result in
improved computer systems?

Bill Joy: We'll see 64-megabit RAMs, and we'll see
flat-paneled high-res displays and portable machines, and ISDN, and
fiber-optic networks, and 32-bit secure operating systems, graphical
prototyping software, the beginnings of voice input, and all sorts of
things that people have talked about for so long.

Dick Shaffer: We should see, toward the end of this decade,
tens of megabytes of main memory.... We will not get much beyond 32
address lines, because there's no need to address that much physical
memory....

Bill Gates: The address base now is this 4-gigabyte, 32-bit
address base, and it will be fairly late into the nineties before that
starts to pain us. We'll probably skip from a 32-bit to a 64-bit
address space. That will last us a long time.

Jonathan Titus: I think we'll see advances in the ability to
do things in parallel on the chip....

Dick Shaffer: My guess is that the AT design and the Intel
architecture will still be dominant....

What kind of architectures do you think will dominate in the
1990s?

Gordon Campbell: ...we're going to see in the mid-nineties a
reassessment, if you will, of the current architectural directions, and
I don't think Intel will be able to push up a compatible product line
much past 1995. And I think the RISC architecture and some of the other
things are going to push for the fundamental changes on the
processor.

Bill Gates: The Intel architecture will continue to dominate,
there's no doubt about that.

Michael Slater: I think the RISC processors are going to wipe
out CISC processors in the engineering workstation arena. I think they
will be much, much slower to take over much of the business market.

Ken Sakamura: I'm not very optimistic about the future of
RISC. It uses too much power.

What kind of storage devices do you think we'll see?

Michael Slater: A hard disk capacity of 00 MB is probably a
base-level capacity that everybody will have, and a couple hundred MB
for the more serious users. I think CD-ROMs will become important as a
distribution and database medium.

Steve Leininger: It would be neat to be able to record and
play back compact disk kinds of things.

Rod Canion: People have been predicting the day when optical
disk technology would replace magnetic disk technology. I don't think
that's likely to happen.

Ken Sakamura: Disks are becoming obsolete... The real trend
will be toward large solid-state memories that use less and less power.
We need computers that can run on the power of a Walkman battery.

The whole area of optical computing is an interesting subject. What
kind of future do you see for that?

John Markoff: Optical computing seems to still be a long way
away.

Rich Malloy: Optical computing, that's probably something
that will be 10, 15 years away before we start using it to any
degree.

What is the biggest obstacle to major new breakthroughs in
computing?

In a word, software, not hardware.

You mentioned the installed base. Does anyone else see that as an
obstacle?

Bjarne Stroustrup: The more acceptance that technology gets,
the harder it is to change. If enough people are stuck at the same
level, they think it's the truth.

Bob Frankston: Actually, the biggest obstacle is marketing
surveys, is people projecting from what we have now, the people trying
to meet felt needs.

Rich Malloy: People get used to doing something in a certain
way and have a great deal of difficulty trying to do something
different, even if it's better. It has to be much, much better to get
people to change products.

To what extent will computer literacy stratify society in the
1990s?

Rod Canion: ...computer literacy is going to be less of a
factor as computers become more straightforward and a simpler mechanism
to use.

Mitch Kapor: I believe that those people who are comfortable
in the operation of computers are going to enjoy certain
advantages....

What do you think will be the next "big one," the next huge success
in the software world?

Doug Engelbart: Multimedia hypertext. I think it's going to
be the way in which the electronic document, so to speak, is
going to emerge, and it's going to be hyperdocuments. That's going to
put a tremendous amount of pressure on standards for
intercommunicating....

John Markoff: I don't think I could name the exact
application, but I think it's going to have to be in the communications
area. It's going to be something that can make communications extremely
transparent.

Bill Gates: In this client/server thing, the idea of seeing
corporate data graphically, being able to browse around it very easily,
and have it sort of remember what stuff you like to see and make it
easy to call up.

1989

1990

Motorola unveils 68040 CPU

Microsoft releases Windows 3.0

Ads

Hewlett Packard was promoting the LaserJet III, which had
"Resolution Enhancement Technology." It was the first laser printer to
use variable dot size, which made 300 dpi quality comparable to 600
dpi.

A two-page ad for the IBM RISC System/6000, a predecessor to PowerPC
architecture, featured Hagar the Horrible and his Viking crew. The
computer ran at 42 MIPS and 13 MFLOPS. (Today's G4 performance is
measured in GFLOPS.)

The Ergo
Brick, a 3" x 8" x 11" totable PC, was billed as the "cure for the
common computer." With a keyboard and monitor at home, another at work,
it gave desktop power in a portable package. Today you could fit three
PowerBook G4/500s in almost the same amount of space as the $2,495 16
MHz 386sx-based Brick.

Insignia promoted SoftPC 1.3, which even ran on a Mac Plus and let
Mac users run DOS software. (I used it on my Plus way back when. It was
slow, but it was definitely the DOS I cut my computing teeth on.)